Sunday Dialogue: A Disillusioned Citizenry

According to a recent Gallup poll, only 42 percent of Americans have faith that government is operating in their interests on domestic matters, and 49 percent trust the government on international matters. I believe that this is a key reason that many Americans are opposed, wrongly in my opinion, to the Affordable Care Act.

Vietnam turned a whole generation sour on government. My brother went over a Goldwater conservative and returned as an anarchist war protester. But we did not learn. The Iraq war was totally unnecessary and cost thousands of American lives and will eventually cost trillions of dollars. It’s not hard to understand why Americans are skeptical of unilateral intervention in Syria.

Other more recent government actions have bred public mistrust. For example, very little was done by Congress to control Wall Street after the economic collapse in 2008. Many called for charges to be brought against financial criminals and stricter banking laws to prevent a future meltdown. What they got was a watered down, ineffective Dodd-Frank Act. I could cite many other examples, including Watergate and the current Congressional impasse that led to a government shutdown. The point is that Americans are generally fed up with what they see as government incompetence and lying.

In my view, this is why Americans do not believe that the Affordable Care Act is being enacted to help them. They have been told time and time again that government actions are in their interests, only to find out that they are not.

The writer is a retired health care executive and former Republican Party chairman of Jasper County.

Readers React

Americans don’t distrust the government. Republicans trust the parts of it run by their party, just as Democrats trust the parts run by theirs. What we distrust is those lowdown, back-stabbing snakes in the grass who belong to the other party.

Ancient Athens was able to produce a functional democracy only after its leaders outlawed the city’s traditional kin-based tribes, forging the city’s people into a single nation. But the leaders of our parties do everything they can to destroy our sense of common goals and common values by dividing us into tribes.

Self-government is a difficult thing. It will always be subject to the influence of selfishly motivated interests, as well as well-meaning but mistaken theories and even outright incompetence.

But it isn’t the government’s mistakes, no matter how often they’re repeated, that make people distrust it. It’s our distrust of our fellow citizens that we see reflected in our negative attitudes about the government.

DAVID RAINES Lunenburg, Mass., Oct. 2, 2013

Vietnam and Iraq were simply bad policy decisions, but there is something more insidious and perhaps far more dangerous going on today. Routine use of filibusters, attacks on voting rights, challenges to the legitimacy of the president, brinkmanship with the debt ceiling — these and other tactics add up to an attack by right-wing extremists on the infrastructure of our democracy.

Loss of faith in government is not just a byproduct of these tactics; it’s the primary objective, with the ultimate goal being dismantlement.

As imperfect as the Affordable Care Act is, it’s the best solution that could have passed Congress during President Obama’s first term. With bipartisan cooperation it could become far better, but the insurgents will apparently not stop until it has been destroyed.

ROBERT Z. OKSNER Winter Park, Fla., Oct. 2, 2013

Why should we trust a government that by any measure is inept, wasteful and corrupt? We can easily see the genesis of the financial meltdown in misguided government policy, yet not one elected official is brought to account. Why should we embrace the Affordable Care Act, 2,700 pages of mass confusion enacted with legislative legerdemain?

To underline this distrust one need only to look at the role of outside money and the perverse role it plays in our electoral system.

BILL BRENNAN Novato, Calif., Oct. 2, 2013

May I suggest that Americans distrust their government because they believe that it no longer serves the public interest? “Washington gridlock” is just an elaborate charade. Both political parties serve special interests: oligarch banks, oil and gas producers, defense contractors, insurance companies and so on. These special interests, in turn, finance Congressional and presidential campaigns and provide well-paying jobs and lobbying fees to elected officials and their staffers when they leave the public sector.

As Mr. Bernard points out, the Affordable Care Act is supposed to provide health care coverage for Americans who cannot afford it. The act is also designed to provide tens of millions of new customers to private health care insurers.

The act was written primarily by staffers of the Senate Finance Committee, whose chairman, Senator Max Baucus, had proponents of single-payer health care forcibly removed from Finance Committee hearings.

The only way I can see for making government more responsive to the needs of the American public, and thus restoring their trust in government, is through a series of constitutional amendments providing for: Congressional term limits; only public funding for Congressional and presidential campaigns; limiting these campaigns to 60 days; and square-shaped Congressional districts to prevent gerrymandering.

Call me cynical, but I believe that entrenched special interests will prevent such amendments from ever coming about.

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If it’s a good idea, sell it. Convincingly. With solid facts, evidence and logic. Whether it’s a war in the Mideast or a sweeping change to America’s health care system, a strong case needs to be made to the American people for trust to be established.

Treat the public like a trial jury; even a rookie lawyer would be embarrassed presenting the weaker-than-weak case about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction that Colin Powell took to the United Nations. Affordable Care Act? Lots of noise, but no coherent and convincing case was ever made to the American people.

I agree with Mr. Bernard that the days when government leaders could get away with “trust us” are over. We want to be convinced, and expect our leaders to do an effective job of convincing us. If they can’t, the chances are pretty good that the public will quickly decide that it’s a bad idea.

GEORGE PETERNEL Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 2, 2013

As I read book after book, essay after essay, describing and analyzing the death of American consensus, I come back to wartime, economic and political disasters that account for our self-doubt and reluctance to trust government.

We did not win militarily in Korea, were defeated in Vietnam, and failed to free Iraq or Afghanistan of strife. We failed to lift entire generations above drugs and crime. Our Supreme Court elevated the wrong man to the presidency and unleashed the wealth of plutocrats into our election process. Millions lost their homes, jobs and hope because of our financial giants. Finally, we elected an introverted scholarly moderate to the presidency when we needed a miracle worker.

Why would we not be depressed and distrustful?

PAUL R. COOPER Yellow Springs, Ohio, Oct. 2, 2013

Mr. Bernard has identified the problem, but not the solution. Like his brother, I was a Goldwater activist before the Vietnam War who became antiwar. Distrust is justified. Anarchy (another name for unbridled libertarianism) is not.

The solution is to elect people who want government to work, not people who simply want to tear government down.

DAN MABBUTT Springdale, Utah, Oct. 2, 2013

Wars, scandals and financial disasters can certainly make Washington look bad, but to find reasons for doubting its ability to manage entitlements, we need look no further than Social Security and Medicare. We’ve known for decades that longer life spans and low birthrates would eventually wreck these programs, without reforms, and what have our leaders offered? The World Cup of can kicking.

A government that refers to its own tax and spending policies as unsustainable (as ours has) and then presents the public with an expensive new entitlement can expect a lot of distrust, if not outright bewilderment.

MICHAEL SMITH Cynthiana, Ky., Oct. 3, 2013

Americans might trust the government more if they fully appreciated the foundation it creates for our economic well-being. Across the economy, it builds and maintains the infrastructure that makes private business possible, often in ways that escape public notice. Try to imagine the computer industry without the Internet, telecommunications without satellites, or automobile manufacturing without Interstate highways, all of them government creations.

A government foundation is nowhere more important than in health care. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, relies on basic biomedical research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health for its very existence. And new health care industries, as yet unimagined, will grow and thrive based on an expanded insurance infrastructure created by the Affordable Care Act.

The government’s failings are painfully visible, while we take many of its successes for granted. Our general mistrust threatens the very engine of our prosperity.

ROBERT I. FIELD Philadelphia, Oct. 2, 2013

The writer is a professor of law and public health at Drexel University and the author of “Mother of Invention: How the Government Created ‘Free-Market’ Health Care.”

The Writer Responds

Apparently, my statements about the public’s distrust of government have struck a nerve.

As a former elected official, I agree with Mr. Brennan’s comments about the “perverse role” of political contributions in our electoral system. The problem is that both parties are married to the lobbyists and, to quote Mr. Raines, the “selfishly motivated interests” that they represent.

In my opinion, that is why President Obama went with national Romneycare versus Medicare for all (my preference), which he once strongly advocated. Big Pharma, large insurance companies and major medical associations all backed the Affordable Care Act. It was in their financial interest to do so, and Mr. Obama needed their clout to get quasi-universal health insurance passed.

Mr. Cooper makes a particularly salient point: Mr. Obama is “an introverted scholarly moderate,” not someone likely to bring about major change. He naïvely decided to advocate a private-sector insurance solution, originally conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation, in hopes that the Republican Party would miraculously find common ground with Democrats.

Anti-Obamacare rhetoric was a major factor in wiping out what was left of the “blue dog” Democrats and ushering in politicians who “want to tear government down,” per Mr. Mabbutt. I agree with him that the solution is to elect people who can work with the other side. But that will only happen if our fragmented electorate votes the radicals out, a much harder task after the partisan 2010 redistricting.

JACK BERNARD Monticello, Ga., Oct. 3, 2013

A version of this letter appears in print on October 6, 2013, on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Sunday Dialogue: A Disillusioned Citizenry. Today's Paper|Subscribe